Martin Scorsese
Taxi Driver

There are moments, in the history of cinema, particular scenes destined to remain in the collective memory, of absolute value, epochal lines that leave a mark; in Taxi Driver, Travis's monologue in front of the mirror has even become the emblem of the film itself, and the symbol of the character (''Are you talkin' to me?'''). What's more, it became so completely by chance; the script did not have anything like it, all thanks to an exceptional Robert De Niro. As they say, when it’s meant to be.

At the time of Taxi Driver, both Scorsese, the director, and Schrader, the screenwriter, as well as the actor, De Niro, were in their thirties: thirty years later, they all became famous, and the film received definitive consecration from critics and the public (despite having already won at Cannes in 1976). How can we forget the performance of a very young Jodie Foster (just thirteen) in the role of the underage prostitute, under the clutches of the filthy Sport (Harvey Keitel)?

As if that weren't enough, the soundtrack of the masterpiece was composed by Bernard Herrmann, Hitchcock’s faithful musician, who died shortly after completing it; the director owes him profound gratitude.

In writing the screenplay, Paul Schrader admits he was inspired by Dostoevsky and Sartre to render the existential figure of Travis, placing him in the American context; the result is a hallucinatory visual transposition of the human condition and depression, of the individual’s crisis. In all this, Scorsese indulges in his deep-rooted pessimism and paints the metropolis, New York, as a real inferno, with intense realism. The story is of a taxi driver, Travis Bickle, a Vietnam vet, increasingly exacerbated by the injustices and violence of the world he lives in, who, in his own way, becomes a vigilante of society; a victim of the system, Travis inevitably heads towards degradation, in the mad endeavor to clean up the streets of New York, and his intoxication will lead him to the final catastrophe. Which isn’t entirely a catastrophe, at least not completely.

Many years later, we can reasonably consider Taxi Driver a foreshadowing of our society today, in which there is no longer any brake on violence and corruption (moral and otherwise). And in which isolation grows (Travis lives in the same way, completely alone).

Unmissable is the self-quotation: the lively and sinister taxi client, played by Scorsese himself, who explains to the silent taxi driver his own ridiculous logic ("You see, my wife is cheating on me, and I'll kill her"). Makes perfect sense.
And then we can only reflect, as the director intended; who knows how many Travises surround us, without us even realizing it. With the difference that, in this case, it is not about a film, but real life.